Death's Doors Excerpt 1: a landscape

‘Like every Canadian,’ the uncle proposed, ‘he has three discernable natures. All without evil. Often without interest as well.’

‘There is a formless general Canadian social nature, nearly inert, but busy when it decides to be busy, creating little intricate smug parochial hierarchies and gibbering about pleasant simple dichotomies, saying nice things but saying them insincerely wherever it goes. I saw a lot of this in my newspaper office. This first nature seeks middle things and desires good feelings in everyone. It is not deep and certainly not to be trusted to make sense.

‘It has no discrimination. But it will discriminate. It will decide things; it can have opinions like to not like Toronto but rather like Vancouver, not like the country but adore the city, not want to work in the government but rather in a small business one day, but not in the sales department or accountancy, it would prefer to be a teacher. Not an American idea in its head. Or so it thinks. No, not ever that. Not ever a banal cultural warrior thought, a stupid know-it-all idea. Not a plotter against humanity. Not refined but a good teller of wise anecdotes and tortuously polite.’

The uncle, who had written a novel on the war dead and had had a collection of his articles published as well as a textbook, elaborated on the second nature provided to each Canadian by their massive expanse of empty landscape. It was their nature.

Maybe a Canadian hadn’t seen any of the expanse or landscape, but he knew it was there. It was the one thing that made him the most smug and talkative. He thought it trumped everyone else’s myths. For this big expanse he expected universal awe. As for himself, he was blinded to most of any features of any other place except by facile comparison. Landscape ate their minds, those Canadians. It was a landscape that swallowed most of the stories about it, made them into cartoons and cute fairytales. A not-known space, not even one imagined adequately.